White Rose by Kip Wilson (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- White Rose by Kip Wilson
Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-328-59443-3 $17.99
E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-358-04917-3 $9.99
Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-12
This poetry sequence chronicles the life of Sophie Scholl, a member of the White [End Page 320] Rose nonviolent resistance group in Germany during Hitler’s regime. The poems primarily alternate between a “Before” section, wherein Sophie is forced to support the regime (“Voluntary, they say, and yet/ we didn’t volunteer”) while plotting with her brother to circulate treasonous pamphlets, and a “The End” section that depicts Sophie’s interrogation and ensuing trial. The poems provide glimpses into Sophie’s life and the laws that ruled it, comprising letters to her lover, decrees by Hitler, and perspective switches to Sophie’s investigators and lawyers. The verses pack an emotional punch, and the chronological segmentation effectively leads up to the moment when twenty-one-year-old Sophie faces her execution as a martyr for her cause, juxtaposing her bold statements in her interrogation—“My heart, beating/so confidently moments ago,/ whimpers, withers, dies,/ but my voice gathers/courage:/ Nein”—with her earlier, increasingly refined radicalism. This will be a highly accessible pathway into conversations about the role of women in war and resistance and a deeper dive for those who encountered Sophie in Freedman’s We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement That Defied Adolf Hitler, BCCB 4/16); it would be an insightful addition to any curriculum about resistance in World War II. End matter contains a dramatis personae with short biographies, a glossary of German words, an author’s note about the legacy of the White Rose, and a list of selected sources.
